Shakespeare, and his great contemporary, George Sand; but this loss was made up by the inevitable and impersonal character of his work when once his genius was thoroughly aroused to action.  His laborious method of describing by an accumulation of details postponed the play of his powers, which are at their height in the action of his characters; yet sooner or later the inert masses of his composition were fused into a burning whole.  But if Balzac is primarily a dramatist in the creation and manipulation of his characters, he is also a supreme painter in his presentation of scenes.  And what characters and what scenes has he not set before us!  Over two thousand personages move through the ‘Comedie humaine,’ whose biographies MM.  Cerfberr and Christophe have collected for us in their admirable ‘Repertoire de la comedie humaine,’ and whose chief types M. Paul Flat has described in the first series of his ‘Essais sur Balzac.’  Some of these personages are of course shadowy; but an amazingly large number live for us as truly as Shakespeare’s heroes and heroines do.  Nor will any one who has trod the streets of Balzac’s Paris, or spent the summer with him at the chateau des Aigues (’Les Paysans’), or in the beautiful valleys of Touraine, ever forget the master’s pictures.

Yet the Balzac who with intangible materials created living and breathing men and women and unfading scenes, has been accused of vitiating the French language and has been denied the possession of verbal style.  On this point French critics must give the final verdict; but a foreigner may cite Taine’s defense of that style, and maintain that most of the liberties taken by Balzac with his native language were forced on him by the novel and far-reaching character of his work.  Nor should it be forgotten that he was capable at times of almost perfect passages of description, and that he rarely confounded, as novelists are too apt to do, the provinces of poetry and prose.

But one might write a hundred essays on Balzac and not exhaust him.  One might write a volume on his women, a volume to refute the charge that his bad men are better drawn than his good, a volume to discuss Mr. Henry James’s epigrammatic declaration that a five-franc piece may be fairly called the protagonist of the ‘Comedie humaine.’  In short one might go on defending and praising and even criticizing Balzac for a lifetime, and be little further advanced than when one began; for to criticize Balzac, is it not to criticize life itself?

[Illustration:  Signature W.P.  Trent]

THE MEETING IN THE CONVENT

From ‘The Duchess of Langeais’

     I